Published Paper Details:

Anita Desai's fiction delves deeply into the psychological landscapes of her characters, often foregrounding the tension between the eternal and the ephemeral aspects of love. In Fire on the Mountain, Journey to Ithaca, Voices in the City, and Cry, the Peacock, Desai crafts a spectrum of emotional experiences in which love appears both as a transcendent, spiritual ideal and as a fleeting, often painful human experience. Through the solitude of Nanda Kaul, the spiritual yearning of Laila and Matteo, the existential disillusionment of Monisha and Amla, and the neurotic collapse of Maya, Desai illustrates how characters struggle to reconcile their longing for a timeless, pure connection with the impermanence and disillusionment of worldly attachments. The conflict between eternal love--imagined as divine, selfless, and enduring--and ephemeral love--marked by desire, dependence, and decay--becomes a central theme that shapes identity, sanity, and personal freedom. Through her lyrical prose and internalized narration, Desai explores how this duality of love serves not only as a reflection of individual inner turmoil but also as a broader commentary on the human condition and the search for meaning in modern life.